everybody wants to be a winner? i am not sure, i don´t think in that terms, or i don´t care about this notion. would be to much of a borden and stress. llcn is my vote. wocn? never ever, that would lead to a zombie network without social competence.

work like a shithorse from 20 to 40 doing 4-12 companies and at least 1 successful i.p.o. hope to be able to let go later on and do whatever you like to from then, travel, lie on the beach, be a cool investor yourself, play electric guitars, have sex as much or as little as you would like to .....Conceptions of losing and winning have marched on a bit. But until then we try to imHafenHerumLiegen as often as if(true == self.ok(nil)).

all that travelling, lying on the beach, being a cool investor yourself, playing electric guitars, having sex sounds like yet another form of putting oneself under pressure. after the shithorse work is done, you have to entertain yourself to death (neil postman always rings twice), no time for a break, for heaven's sake.

Folks, I hope I'm not jumping into established conversations with histories and assumptions about context when I comment on some of your musings, but I've gotten to go off on some fascinating tangents following some of your links. One of them has been Winnerless Competition Networks. I think you were using the term as a tongue in cheek moniker for transatlantic software supremacy, but, as an old neural net junkie, I was fascinated to follow up on that stuff. It sounds like networks of neurons, embedded in a four dimensional world, learned to use time/phase space to store vastly more discriminations than I'd heretofore seen possible with Hopfield style nets. By using time, they get something like (N-1)! of these heteroclinic orbit attractors out of an N element net, vs. a fraction of N**2 or somesuch (I forget right now) for straight associative nets. That's a tremendous increase in discriminative capacity, and has all kinds of implications for interpreting why we seem to have these 8-40Hz clocks emerge in EEG measurements. Further, such an organization would be much easier to tune to temporal phenomenon, both in terms of recognizing them, and orchestrating them. So, thanks for pointing me at this stuff. Good fertilizer for the old cortex...

As far as I understood it, "WCN" was used in three ways at least.a) as a tangent (thx for the nice image) for everybody interested in "neural networks" where not yet known stuff might always be interesting.b) for anybody disquieted by the "winner takes all" mechanism in quite some neural network constructs as a angst reduction moniker.c) in a similar way as a moniker or metaphor for the possibility of peer to peer networking that don't end up with a big winner and many contributers.

i'll try to clear up more on the transatlantic stuff: what i tried to suggest is that after having been forced out of the overt stuff Europeans also give up on the hidden elements of their "cultural superiority" paradigm and accept that they can really learn a lot from the real values of the none European culture continuum. I argued against a kind of thinking that revels in debating wether catholics or protestants are better Christians. Regarding the east and south Americans should do (and some do) the same thing.

My hypothesis was, that statistically America still learns more what it can from Europe than Europe does from America.As a sidethought I would also suspect that the famous Japanese learning process has shifted into reverse mode a while ago.

"a ten-neuron WLC network should be able to identify hundreds of thousands as many items as a conventional ten-neuron network." (wlc). i like it. especially if they proof,(tend to say again and again and again) that the concept of winning means simply to be short-sighted, missing a lot of what is out there.

As neural network research has exploded in recent years there are now lots more papers and abstracts on the net. Everybody can goog or bing them theirselves and select what might be pleasing or interesting. I just like to add a link and quote from an older one:

Starting from the biological background on the olfactory architecture of both insects and mammalians, different nonlinear systems able to respond to spatial-distributed external stimuli with spatial–temporal dynamics have been investigated in the last decade.